amber wolf eyes, her softer amber skin. I’d miss her intelligence and ambition, her fearlessness in the face of my Auphe blood, and her willingness to jump me anytime anywhere.
Hey, I was a guy. Grey might have lost his equipment, but I hadn’t lost mine. The jumping part was going to figure into the equation somewhere. It didn’t mean I wouldn’t miss her for the other reasons too.
“No running,” she replied, not sounding as worried as she should have. That was Delilah. There wasn’t a situation she didn’t think she could turn to her advantage or a creature she imagined capable of taking her down. And mostly she was right, but there was also a part of her that was crazy as hell.
“The Kin aren’t going to let this go, Delilah,” I said. She had to know that as well as I did.
She dismissed the grim warning. “I have friends. In many packs. This can be fixed, but good idea to get out of town for a while. Where do you go? I’ll meet you. Help with job, for free even.”
I paused, thinking, then answered, “ Canton, Ohio. An IHOP on Cleveland Avenue. It’s a little more than four hundred miles. We’ll be there in hopefully less than seven hours, depending on Niko’s excuse for a car. Call me when you get there.”
“Seven hours,” she laughed, sounding like rough velvet. “I’ll have meal and five beers by time you come. Little boys riding tricycle.” Still laughing, she disconnected.
I closed my eyes as I leaned my head back against the seat and folded up my phone, feeling Niko’s gaze on me. “You’re looking at me, aren’t you?”
“I am.” His voice was definitely not rough velvet, but unyielding granite.
“Is it a sympathetic look full of brotherly love? You know, the kind that says I have your back? Behind you all the way?” I asked without much optimism.
“No, it is not,” he said evenly.
I kept my eyes shut. The sun-tinged pink-black was preferable to one of Niko’s glacial glares. It wasn’t as if I wasn’t suspicious. I was damn suspicious. Delilah helping on a job for free? That would happen about the same time I caught the Easter Bunny hiding eggs in our loft, but… after all we’d been through, she deserved a chance to prove herself. “But I’m a man now,” I said, “and able to deal with the consequences of my actions. You said so yourself.”
“It appears I was wrong in that respect. Your bringing Kin business, especially this business, along on a job is not the wisest or most mature of moves. In fact, I can’t offhand think of a more dangerous one. I revoke your pretend bar mitzvah. The bris is looking more likely, however.” He started the car and we took off as if there were a jet engine under the hood instead of a thirty-year-old V-8. I felt the two thumps in rapid succession. One was the curb; one wasn’t.
“The werewolf under the car?” I asked.
Robin would’ve seen the wolf slither under there, but would’ve known we would figure it out on our own and not bothered with a warning. I’d smelled it as soon as we’d gotten out of the taxi. Niko would’ve seen a stray strand of fur, a flicker of movement, or tracked a flight of birds across the sky and somehow read in their movements “potential roadkill below.” With my brother, it didn’t matter how. All you had to realize was that he would know.
“Yes, the Wolf under the car,” he confirmed matter-of-factly, “and now you know why I drive big, old cars. A werewolf does very little damage to it when you run one down.” I opened my eyes and turned to see what we’d left on the curb of Robin’s car lot. The car might not have suffered any damage, but the Kin Wolf couldn’t say the same.
The street sweeper was going to have a helluva time with that.
“More than a day for the coffin thief to make it to Canton from the Catskills.” The evening before last the meningitis outbreak had taken place-bacterial meningitis, the bad kind; the kind that tended to kill teenagers in a day, maybe two. “That’s not exactly making good time,” I observed. It should’ve been about an eight-hour drive. “Maybe whoever hired the guys to steal Suyolak came along with them, dumped the muscle when he had the coffin in the truck, and is doing the driving alone.” But still… eight hours a day? If it was as Niko and I had discussed and this guy was hoping to use Suyolak to heal a critically ill relative, he should be in more of a hurry than that.
“If Suyolak started ten or so cases of meningitis here, there’s no telling what he’s done to the men in the truck. They could have deserted. They might be in the hospital here. They might be in the morgue. This is not good news. He’s not out of the coffin; if he were, a few cases of meningitis are the very least of what he could do. But in the coffin… he shouldn’t be able to do anything at all,” Niko said, parking in front of the Canton equivalent of IHOP. Not that Nik would normally ever consider eating at a genuine IHOP, but it was a good central location for Abelia and her own muscle, Delilah, and us all to meet.
“We need to have a chat with the Wicked Bitch of the East then, huh? See what’s up with Suyolak.” I got out of the car. “I’ll go inside and get a paper while you call Abelia and find out where her wrinkled ass is. Call Delilah too, would you? She should’ve been here a long time ago.” It was two. Niko had shaved an hour off the estimate. Maybe he’d been tinkering with the engine, because while the car looked like shit, the thing could move. I patted a growling stomach. It wasn’t only a paper I was going to pick up.
“And when you return with your lard pancakes coated with diabetes-inducing syrup and chemically created whipped cream, perhaps I might give you a foot massage while you dine. We could see what kind of time
Niko’s opinion and mood over my inviting Delilah along or allowing her to invite herself had not improved, and that didn’t look like it was going to change any time soon. He had every reason to be pissed. There wasn’t any way this couldn’t end in trouble no matter what Delilah said. But whether it was trouble in New York or trouble wherever we happened to be, it was the same. I wanted it over with. Keeping it hanging over my head only messed with my head. It was almost poetry there and true. I’d learned that lesson more than once.
“Yeah, okay. I’ll call her,” I grumped. “A foot massage would’ve been nice, though.”
When I came back with a paper tucked under my arm and three bags, Robin was awake and Salome was following a homeless man around the parking lot. “Uh… Goodfellow?”
“She’s just playing,” he said dismissively. When he saw that didn’t quite put my mind at ease, he added, “Not serious play. We won’t have to stuff his body in the trunk or anything. What do you have against cats anyway?”
“Nothing… not against live ones that aren’t feline-shaped velociraptors.” I handed him a bag and put mine in the front seat-eminent domain, cat. Suck that up. Squatting rights were over. I also handed Niko a bag. “Plain yogurt, melon, and I bribed them to make you an egg white omelet. They cooked it in butter, but it was the best I could do. And you don’t have to massage my feet.”
“If only I could massage your brain into working,” he muttered, then exhaled, reaching out a hand to rest on top of my head and give me a light, affectionate push. “I apologize. It’s your decision, even if I think it’s an idiotically foolish one.” Nik did know how to make with the esteem boosters.
“Everyone deserves a chance.” Or the few people I liked deserved a chance. The rest of the world… eh. “You taught me that by giving me about seven more than I deserved.”
Before he could comment or give me any more ego-boosting brotherly compliments on my idiocy, a motorcycle rumbled behind me and came to a stop, going silent. “I’ll make sure there’s no problem,” I went on to promise him quietly.
“You talk of me, pretty boy? I cause trouble? Never.”
I’d smelled her over the motorcycle exhaust, but now I turned to see Delilah sitting on a pearl metallic white Harley. The paint almost exactly matched her hair, which was pulled back into a waist- length ponytail. She was wearing white riding leathers too, not to escape road rash. Wolves were too quick. If they crashed, they’d change in midair. If they did break a bone or two, they’d heal quickly in fur form. Delilah just liked to look good and she did look damn good in the leathers. Dark amber-tinted sunglasses hid equally amber eyes.
“I prefer the Godiva look, but it does have a certain superhero slickness to it,” Robin offered as he investigated the contents of his bag.
